None I've come across, but we do get hints as to what it could contain in the opening pages of a previous DESIGNS. THEN AGAIN, considering Nagano and the time that has passed since DESIGNS started rolling out, it could be more varied than planned.

I'm safely guessing we'll see more artwork concerning the pre-JC times and more of those cyber freaks marked with the "Hand of Caligula". It'd be sweet to see new work related to Lachesis' time-wandering.

Last edited by DYNAKYRIS on Tue May 15, 2012 6:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My thoughts are that D4 will contain a lot of info on stuff that has only been hinted at. Monarch Sacred, Hand of Caligula, maybe info on Lachesis travels (mentioned above) and maybe some stuff about the various gods and spirits of Joker and Taika etc.

Hobby Link Japan just accepted my payment for 2 copies of FSS Designs 4. I'm pretty sure they're going to ship them to me on Monday. One copy is for reading while the other copy is for... setting next to the scanner. Yeah.

The short answer is that Gothicmade has replaced Heavy Metal L-Gaim as the baseline for Five Star Stories. I imagine Nagano actually explains somewhere why he made that change, but since I don't have Designs 4 yet I don't know if it's in there anywhere. The joints are weird because Nagano is not a mechanical engineer but someone must have told him about the square-cube law so he can't just scale up human joints like he did before.

Maybe I'm way off (it wouldn't be the first time) but this sounds like a major revision for Five Star Stories. So, the GothicMade movie becomes an earlier era of the FSS universe? Should these new mecha designs be called mortar heads? Should we create a new section of the Gears Online FSS pages and isolate the new material there? What should I keep in mind as I approach adding FSS Designs 4 images to the Gears pages?

Perhaps it would be best to hold off answering my questions until you get your copy of the book and read it. Thank you for your help understanding this.

One of these days I'll translate the new timeline but yes, Gothicmade is officially part of the FSS timeline taking place on planet Both in JC451; GTM Kaiserin replaces MH Empress of Flame. The only mechanical changes to new FSS are the replacement of all MH with GTMs and spaads with gat-blow energy gunblades. The rest are just same-thing-with-new-name terminology changes (mostly in German). Presumably if the large-format manga reprint ever happens all the dialogue will be retconned to match.

the only reason I can think as to why he would make such drastic changes would be is if there was some sort of Cease and Desist from Sunrise about the L-Gaim content in FSS. That makes the most sense. The other reason that makes sense is that Nagano finally snapped. Probably both.